Semantic relationships in conversion

The change in syntactic function and paradigm, i.e. in distribution, that the stem undergoes in conversion is obvious from the examples. As to the semantic changes, they are at first sight somewhat chaotic. Many authors have pointed out that dust v means ^lto remove dust from smth* and also the opposite, i.e. 'to powder', 'to cover with smth' (e. g. to dust a cake with sugar); stone v means 'to throw stones at¹, 'to put to death by throwing stones at¹ and also 'to remove the stones' (from fruit).

A closer investigation will show, however, some signs of patterned relationships, especially if one observes semantically related groups. The lexical meaning of the verb points out the instrument, the agent, the place, the cause, the result and the time of action. The examples below serve only to illustrate this, the classification beingfarfromexhaustive.lt should be also borne in mind that the verbs are mostly polysemantic and have other meanings in addition to those indicated. Like other verbs creating a vivid image they often receive a permanent metaphorical meaning.

Verbs based on nouns denoting some part of the human body will show a regularity of instrumental meaning, even though the polyse­mantic ones among them will render other meanings as well, e. g. eye 'to watch carefully' (with eyes); finger 'to touch with the fingers¹; hand ^lto give or help with the hand": elbow *to push or force one's way with the elbows'; toe 'to touch, reach or kick with the toes'. The verb head conforms to this pattern too as alongside its most frequent meaning 'to be at the head of, and many others,it possesses the meaning 'to strike with one's head' (as in football).

The same type of instrumental relations will be noted in stems de­noting various tools, machines and weapons: to hammer, to knife, to ma­chine-gun, to pivot, to pump, to rivet, to sandpaper, to saw, to spur,

to flash-light, to wheel, to free-wheel (said about a car going with the engine switched off), or more often 'to travel on a bicycle without pedalling (usually downhill)', etc.

Sometimes the noun names the agent of the action expressed in the verb, the action being characteristic of what is named by the noun: crowd 'to come together in large numbers'; flock 'to gather in flocks'; herd 'to gather into a herd'; swarm 'to occur or come in swarms'. The group of verbs based on the names of animals may be called metaphorical, as their meaning implies comparison. They are also agential, in so far as the verb denotes the behaviour considered characteristic of this or that animal (as an agent), e. g. ape 'to imitate in a foolish way as an ape does'; dog 'to follow close behind as a dog does*; monkey 'to mimick, mock or play mischievous tricks like those of a monkey'; wolf (down) 'to eat quickly and greedily like a wolf. A smaller subgroup might be classified under the heading of resultative relations with the formulas: 'to hunt some animal' and ⁴to give birth to some animal', e. g. to fox, to rabbit, to rat, to foal.

With nouns denoting places, buildings, containers and the like the meaning of the converted verb will be locative: bag 'to put in a bag'; bottle 'to store in bottles'; can 'to put into cans'; corner 'to set in a cor­ner'; floor 'to bring to the floor*; garage 'to put (a car) in a garage'; pocket 'to put into one's pocket'.

Verbs with adjective stems, such as blind, calm, clean, empty, idle_% lame, loose, tidy, total show fairly regular semantic relationships with the corresponding adjectives. Like verbs with adjective stems that had been formerly suffixed and lost their endings (e. g. to thin<OE thyn-nian) they denote change of state. If they are used intransitively, they mean 'to become blind, calm, clean, empty, etc.', their formula as tran­sitive verbs is: 'to make blind, calm, clean, etc.'.

Deverbal nouns formed by conversion follow the regular semantic correlations observed in nouns formed with verbal stems by means of derivation. They fall, among others, under the categories of process, result, place or agent. Thus, for instance, go, hiss, hunt, knock name the process, the act or a specific instance of what the verbal stem ex­presses. The result or the object of the verbal action is denoted in such nouns as burn, catch, cut, find, lift, offer, tear, e. g.:... he stood up and said he must go. There were protests, offers of a lift back into town and invitations (McCrone).¹ Tory cuts were announced ("Morning Star").

The place where the action occurs is named by the nouns drive, forge, stand, walk, and some others.

H. Marchand² points out a very interesting detail, namely, that the deverbal personal nouns formed by means of conversion and denoting the doer are mostly derogatory. This statement may be illustrated by the following examples: bore, cheat, flirt, scold 'a scolding woman*, tease 'a person who teases'. E. g.: But as soon as he (Wagner) puts his

¹ The noun protests is not referred to as conversion, because its basic form is not homonymous to that of the verb due to the difference of stress: 'protest n:: protest v.

² Marchand H. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation, p.p. 293-308.

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Wotans and Siegfrieds and Parcivals on the stage, so many heavy men, who stand in one place for an hour heavily wrestling with a narrative that nobody can understand, he is the very emperor of the bores (Priest­ley).

This is significant as it shows that the language has in store some pat­terned morphological ways to convey emotional meaning; these ways can form a parallel to the suffixes denoting deprecation, such as -ard, -ling, -ster.¹

The list of sense groups mentioned above is by no means exhaustive, there are many more that are difficult to systematize or are less numer­ous, such as, for instance, instrumental relations.

Nouns may be formed by conversion from any other part of speech as well, for instance from adverbs:... the bounding vitality which had carried her through what had been a life of quite sharp ups and downs (Mc-Crone).

Alongside these regular formations many occasional ones are coined every day as nonce-words. Sometimes, though not necessarily, they display emotional colouring, give a jocular ring to the utterance or sound as colloquialisms. E. g.: "Now then, Eeyore/' he said. "Don't bus­tle me," said Eeyore, getting up slowly. "Don't now-then me.'* (Milne) This rough approximation to a patterned system should not be over­emphasized. As a matter of fact, words formed by conversion readily adapt themselves to various semantic development and readily acquire figurative meanings; on the other hand, there are many cases of repeat­ed formations from the same polysemantic source, each new formation being based on a different meaning. Interesting examples of these were investigated by S.M. Kostenko.

The polysemantic noun bank was used as a basis for conversion sev­eral times. Bank ⁴to contain as a bank', 'to enclose with a bank' (1590) is derived from the meaning 'the margin of a river, lake, etc.'; bank (earth or snow) ^lto pile up¹ (1833) is derived from the meaning 'a mound'; bank (a car) 'to tilt in turning¹, 'to travel with one side higher' is coined metonymically, because in motor car racing the cars performed the turn on the raised bank at the end of the racing ground. Later on the word was borrowed into aviation terminology where it is used about air­craft both transitively and intransitively with the same meaning 'to tilt in turning'.

All the above listed meanings of bank n and bank v exist in the Eng­lish vocabulary today, which brings us to a conclusion of great impor­tance. It shows that a polysemantic verb (or noun) formed by conver­sion is not structured semantically as a separate unit and does not con­stitute a system of meanings, because its separate meanings are not con­ditioned by each other but by respective meanings of the prototype. If we take the semantic aspect as the level of contents, and the phonetic aspect of the word as the level of expression, we shall see one semantic structure corresponding to the phonetic complex Ibaerjkl and not two semantic structures, one corresponding to the noun and the other to the verb, like the two morphological paradigms. * For a more detailed treatment see Ch. 5.

It goes without saying that very much yet remains to be done in elu­cidating these complex relationships.¹

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